So, back to geekery after too many months away. While we
were in Thailand, I met Theppitak
Karoonboonyanan and his friend Neutron Soutmun and a
couple of others from the Thai Linux community. Thep is in
the NM process for Debian, he maintains Thai support
packages in Debian and Neutron is a Debian user. Neutron
writes firmware for GPS receivers (IIRC) and other GIS
stuff, I'm hoping he will get involved in the debian-gis
subproject. I think I convinced Neutron to at least think
about applying to NM :D. We talked about a lot of things,
mainly about Thai localisation and the challenges involved.
He mentioned that the language barrier is a big problem for
Thai people, so their main focus has been firstly
infrastructure (text rendering, layout and wrapping, fonts,
input methods, locale, etc) and now translation (and the
associated, laborious localisation efforts). He told me a
bit about the writing system and how it is related to other
systems in the area. Thep also mentioned the possibility of
debconf9 being in Thailand, I recon it would be bloody
awesome to have debconf in Asia. At least one other Debian
Developer is interested in this, madduck is the initial
instigator. I hope we both make it to debconf in the UK
this year. I also visited the open source lab at NECTEC (the Thai
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), which
is government funded. There, they develop LinuxTLE (an
Ubuntu based desktop distro), LinuxSIS (a simple internet
server for schools and businesses) and do lots of
translation and advocacy work within NECTEC and with
businesses and other organisations within Thailand. One
thing about LinuxPLE which I noted was that during the
post-install GUI configuration step, there is an option to
setup the system to use fonts from a mounted Windows
partition. IIRC, they explained that they found this was
important because of a reliance on Microsoft fonts in
Thailand. While I was there, I went to a couple of other
labs and saw a demo of a cool Thai OCR and car registration
plate recognition system, English to Thai machine
translation (text) and direct English speech to Thai
speech conversion. They were also working on some medical
imaging and speech recognition stuff that I didn't get to
see. I also met the founder of linux.thai.net, whose
company develops this online map for
Bangkok..